Without limiting the scope of the invention, its background is described in connection with planning for radiosurgery and/or radiation oncology procedures.
One such system is discussed in United States Patent Application No. 20040242991, filed by Frohlich, et al. for a method for determining dosage when planning radiotherapy and/or radiosurgery procedures. Briefly, a method for determining dosage when planning radiotherapy and/or radiosurgery procedures can include imaging an irradiation target area using an imaging method which can differentiate functional and/or biologically active regions of the irradiation target area. The activity values ascertained can be allocated to individual regions of the imaged irradiation target and irradiation doses can be assigned to the regions in accordance with the activity values. Finally, a nominal dosage distribution, which can be ascertained from the irradiation dosages for the regions, can be used as an input value for treatment planning.
Yet another system is taught in United States Patent Application No. 20050049478, filed by Kuduvalli, et al., for an image guided radiosurgery method and apparatus using registration of 2D radiographic images with digitally reconstructed radiographs of 3D scan data. Briefly, an image-guided radiosurgery method and system use 2D/3D image registration to keep the radiosurgical beams properly focused onto a treatment target. Next, a pre-treatment 3D scan of the target is generated at or near treatment planning time and a set of 2D digitally reconstructed radiographs (DRRs) are generated, based on the pre-treatment 3D scan. At least one 2D x-ray image of the target is generated in near real time during treatment and the DRRs are registered with the x-ray images, by computing a set of 3D transformation parameters that represent the change in target position between the 3D scan and the x-ray images. The relative position of the radiosurgical beams and the target is adjusted continuously in near real time in accordance with the 3D transformation parameters. Finally, a hierarchical and iterative 2D/3D registration algorithm is used, in which the transformation parameters that are in-plane with respect to the image plane of the x-ray images are computed separately from the out-of-plane transformation parameters.